I'm now looking at a new Office 365 implementation where, for the time being, we will only use the Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) but will most likely use Exchange Online later (in a hybrid scenario).

Indeed, the plan (probably E3) includes both the Office suite and Exchange Online (and quite a few other products, as you know). So it would be a waste not to use Exchange Online even if some of the mailboxes remain onsite (to be decided).

It looks like we will be moving ahead with the use of the Office suite more quickly than Exchange Online. That's just the way it is for various reasons I see no need to detail here.

So... I'm trying to outline what must be done to use the Office suite component of Office 365, leaving Exchange elements on the back burner for now.

Configure synchronization and SSO. We will use a 3rd party product like Okta. Otherwise, this would be ADFS and DirSync (or whatever they call it now).

Assign licenses

At this point, I think we could concentrate on setting up Office suite functionality (connect to Office online products, download installable Office products and access OneDrive with SSO).

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Later, for Exchange, we would adjust firewall settings, adjust client access urls and certificate subject alternate names, enable Outlook Anywhere (currently it is not), run the Hybrid Config Wizard and a number of other things.

> Would there be a particular reason to use AAD Connect EVEN IF the 3rd party product will take care of synchronization?

You know I work for Microsoft, right? So I can't speak for Okta. My logic is simply that AAD Connect is the reference that all other tools are based on, is free, will be the first to be updated, and will be supported by Microsoft in case you have a problem.__________________[MSFT]; Blog: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/389thoughts/

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